Archive for postdoc

Here is an offer for a 6 to 12 month postdoc in Paris, with one theme potentially interesting for Og’s readers:

The CARMIN Project, created as part of the call for “laboratories of excellence” of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, aims at creating places where mathematicians can exchange and pool their skills in order to solve big scientific issues. In the mathematics field, there are indeed a number of open scientific problems that cannot be solved by a single person. This “mathematical” infrastructure is essential for maintaining excellence in the French mathematical school at the highest international level. (More information)­ ­

PRESENTATION of the PROGRAMM

As part of the LabEx CARMIN, IHES and IHP offer young researchers in mathematics a joint post-doctoral programme for 2012-2013 that will enable candidates selected by the Scientific Committee to combine a research visit at IHES with participation to one of the quaterly IHP thematic programmes for a duration of 6 to 12 months.

CONDITION

• To have obtained a PhD in 2009 or later.

­• To participate in one of the three thematic trimestrial programmes 2012-2013 at IHP:

Speaking from personal experience, postdoctoral positions are an essential part of a researcher training that I recommend to all my PhD students, even though they do not always follow this recommendation, and rank high when hiring new faculty! Especially recommended in our French academic structure where

PhD students may complete their PhD as early as 25 or 26,

the local job market is rather favourable to statisticians,

regular university positions are tenured from the start, but

involve a heavy teaching load…

and do pay less than a postdoc in many countries!

Unless family issues are preventing one from spending one or two years abroad, the experience brought by spending this time in a foreign department with a different academic culture is almost invariably highly positive. And this for many reasons: a high level of freedom and time for conducting research, most often no teaching, writing papers and fattening one’s vita, no administrative burden, usually in a prestigious institution with a top quality research group, the opportunity to start collaborations with more senior researchers, limited or no teaching, sometimes the opportunity of learning a new (human/computer) language, the possibility of discovering a new country, did I mention not teaching?!, etc. Even though sabbatical years are available in most academic systems, this is clearly the freest of all times in one’s life and taking the opportunity of a postdoc can shape one’s academic and non-academic future! So, unless there are no postdoc positions available anywhere appealing (!), or those offered are in a topic that sounds too far from one’s PhD research, there are few reasons to miss the benefits and the fun of doing a postdoc. I consider that doing a postdoc (in Purdue then in Cornell, terrific experiences both!) was one of the best and most influential decisions in my whole life. (This sounds a bit too much like a travel brochure, but this was my answer to Luke Bornn’s question “In what circumstances would you recommend your students do a post-doc? In what circumstances is a post-doc not the best choice for graduates?” for the June ISBA Bulletin!)

Although the official deadline is long past, I just became aware of this call for a postdoctoral position in Paris starting next Fall. Please feel free to apply:

Summary Adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are currently a very active field of research. MCMC methods are sampling methods, based on Markov Chains which are ergodic with respect to the target probability measure. The principle of adaptive methods is to optimize on the fly some design parameters of the algorithm with respect to a given criterion reflecting the sampler’s performance (optimize the acceptance rate, optimize an importance sampling function, etc…). A postdoctoral position is opened to work on the numerical analysis of adaptive MCMC methods: convergence, numerical efficiency, development and analysis of new algorithms. A particular emphasis will be given to applications in statistics and molecular dynamics. (Detailed description) Position funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) through the 2009-2012 project ANR-08-BLAN-0218. The position will benefit from an interdisciplinary environment involving numerical analysts, statisticians and probabilists, and of strong interactions between the partners of the project ANR-08-BLAN-021

Required diploma PhD thesis in statistics or probability, with a competitive track record.

Required skills experience in MCMC methods and their mathematical analysis.

Deadline for applications : September 2010. Applications must include : a detailed CV with a description of realized projects a motivation letter a summary of the thesis 2 or 3 recommendation letters preferred starting dates and duration and must be sent to Gersende FORT (gfort@tsi.enst.fr) in pdf format; or by standard mail to : Gersende FORT (LTCI, 46 rue Barrault, 75 634 Paris Cedex 13, Paris, France).

The Department of Statistics at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is seeking candidates for a Post-Doctoral Fellowship. This research fellowship provides full funding without any teaching requirements at a competitive salary for two years beginning in Summer 2011.

Applicants are expected to show outstanding capacity for research as well as excellent communication skills. Although our department is located in the Wharton School, we provide services to the entire University of Pennsylvania and hold research interests across diverse scientific fields. We have strong research programs in many areas of statistics, including Continue reading →

Another announcement I got today, for an interesting postdoc with Olivier Cappé at Telecom, covering potentially Bayesian applications:

A one year post-doctoral position is offered at the Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l’Information (LTCI), the joint laboratory of CNRS and Telecom ParisTech (aka ENST), physically located in Telecom ParisTech‘s buildings in downtown Paris.

The position is within the project MGA (Graphical Models and Applications), funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). The MGA project is a joint research project with teams from INRIA (Francis Bach), Mines ParisTech (Jean-Philippe Vert) and Ecole des Ponts ParisTech (Jean-Yves Audibert). The MGA projects deals with graphical models (in a broad sense) and applications in bioinformatics, computer vision and natural language processing. The MGA team is, among other things, organizing a regular seminar on machine learning that gathers researchers and students from Paris area in mathematics, computer science, and various application domains. Within LTCI, the postdoc will be in the STA (Statistics and Applications) Group and supervised by Olivier Cappé.

Candidates should have a PhD in the areas of machine learning, computational statistics or signal processing. Familiarity with (at least one of) kernel methods, graphical models, Bayesian computation, inference in latent variable models will be appreciated.

The postdoctoral researcher will be employed by the CNRS with a net salary of about 2000 EUR per month. The position is for one year, starting January 2010. Candidates should send a detailed CV, including a list of publications to Olivier Cappé (cappe [à] telecom-paristech.fr)

I received this email about a fairly exciting postdoc position with Sylvia Richardson (watch out for the short deadline!):

Applications are invited for a Research Fellow in Statistics to join the Biostatistics research group within the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the St Mary’s campus. The department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics is based within the newly created School of Public Health. The post holder will carry out leading edge research in statistical methodology related to the analysis of high order interactions, with applications in epidemiology, as part of a collaborative research study funded by the French Institute for Medical Research. You will work under the supervision of Professor Sylvia Richardson to develop new methods and implement them to carry out substantive analyses of patterns of interactions in a large epidemiological data base.

Applicants should hold a PhD or equivalent in Statistics or a related quantitative subject. Proven experience of programming in C++ and R, regression models and some knowledge of Bayesian model building are required. Experience in modelling and developing computational algorithms and experience of data analysis using modern statistical modelling techniques would be an advantage. Applicants should be motivated, well organised and able to work effectively as part of a team. This full time post is for a fixed-term of 18 months. For informal enquiries please contact Sylvia Richardson (sylvia.richardson [à] imperial.ac.uk).

Committed to equality and valuing diversity. We are also an Athena Silver SWAN Award winner and a Stonewall Diversity Champion. The deadline for full consideration is the 17th February 2010. Apply online. Please quote post reference: SM007-10

Yesterday, my PhD student Aude Grelaud defended her thesis in Dauphine, in front of a wide audience of fans and quite brilliantly! Aude was working both with Francois Rodolphe from INRA and with me on both statistical and biological aspects of ABC (what else?!) at both CREST and INRIA, while teaching at both Dauphine and ENSAE, which made for a rather diverse environment. Besides the ABC paper for model choice we wrote together, she wrote a very good synthesis on the current state of ABC algorithms that will be soon submitted. Plus an application of SMC-ABC to selection pressure in evolution genetics. Aude is leaving in a few days for Rutgers University, and a joint postdoc between Statistics and Biology, where I wish her the best! This makes for a second brilliant ABC thesis in one week!